Brian Rockey was at a gala at a downtown bank when he got a call about 11 p.m. on Feb. 18, 2006.
He was the marketing director for the Nebraska Lottery back then, and the caller was an IT guy from the office. And he was talking way too fast for Rockey to understand him.
Rockey asked again why he was calling this Saturday night.
It was sold here.
That would be the winning ticket for the then-biggest Powerball jackpot ever, and it had been sold at a U-Stop on West O.
“We’re gonna have to go home,†Rockey told his wife, Dawn.
Eight jackpot-winning tickets had been sold in Nebraska since the state joined the Multi-State Lottery Association in 1994, and Rockey had worked press conferences for six of them.
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But he knew immediately this was going to be a wild ride.
Rockey, who now works in the private sector with International Gaming Technology, remembers well the flurry surrounding the Lucky Eight, right down to the 21 news cameras he counted in the Cornhusker Marriott ballroom when the winners were introduced by the governor at a Wednesday news conference.Â
He got home that first night to a perpetually ringing telephone -- local and national news reporters, TV networks, talk show booking agents, all calling in search of any shred of information about who won the $365 million jackpot.
“I’m on my cellphone and (Dawn's) on the land line talking to someone in New York, saying, ‘Do you realize what time it is?’ I think I went to bed at 2-something,†he said last week.
The gravity of the situation hit then-Nebraska Lottery Director Jim Haynes about the same time that night. So did the phone calls.
Haynes, now retired, got his own call from the IT guy that night, and then he got a call from a producer at a major TV network. He can’t remember which one, since pretty much all of them called eventually.
“‘We’re rolling trucks from another state to Nebraska to this event,’†the producer told him. “Trucks. I thought, ‘Oh my.’â€
He, Rockey and Tom Johnson, then public relations director for the Nebraska Lottery, met early the next morning at their office to figure out how to deal with the furor, all the while wondering themselves when a winner would come forward. Johnson, who couldn’t be reached last week, went to the U-Stop to field questions from reporters gathering there, his former co-workers recalled. Everyone fielded phone calls.
That first day passed with no word from a winner.
Rockey headed home at 5 or 6 that evening and checked the messages -- plural, of course. One was from some guy saying he was a Lincoln attorney.
"I have a question about the Powerball," Rockey recalls Jim Hoppe saying on the message.
He figured his wife put the caller up to it, but he called back.
“He said, ‘Well, I’m sitting here with some people that have the winning ticket,’†Rockey remembered. “I said, ‘OK …’"
He told Hoppe that, if he really did have the winners with him, he should advise them to hold off talking with anybody -- media included -- until they could meet with lottery officials.
That wouldn't be a problem. It turned out they weren’t in search of a spotlight to go along with their windfall.Â
Most of the winners holed up at the Embassy Suites starting that Sunday night to avoid cold calls at their homes. But that's where many of the media that whooshed in from out of town were staying. The future millionaires fled downtown and landed at the old Harvester Hotel, out by the state pen.
By Monday, rumor was spreading at Cook Family Foods that a group of plant workers had hit the jackpot.
"We have not heard anything from anybody that works anywhere that has a ticket or anything," Rockey told the Journal Star that day. "I know lots of stories are floating around. But we don't have anything that can be substantiated."
Score it a truth on a technicality. They’d only talked with Hoppe at that point, and they still hadn’t seen the ticket.
Meanwhile, the false reports accumulated, Haynes said. Most were prank calls, but one involved a professional hoaxer who had also snuck a fake ref onto the field for four plays in the middle of Super Bowl XVII. At the Village Inn at 66th and O, a guy dropped $2,000 on the counter, flashed what looked like a winning lottery ticket and said, “Dinner’s on me.†Reporters came running.
But, Rockey told reporters then, the man hadn't come forward to claim the prize. Read the back of a Lotto ticket -- and go ahead and sign it immediately if you ever buy one, Haynes advises -- and you’ll see that a prize over $20,000 must be claimed in person at the Nebraska Lottery office in Lincoln. Anyone can go around buying pie and saying they won the jackpot, but they don’t get paid out until they go to the lottery headquarters or dare to mail it in.
Unless, it turns out, there's a record-setting jackpot.
The two sides agreed to meet Tuesday, but Hoppe didn't want it to go down at the Nebraska Lottery office, where cameras whirled around every time the elevator doors opened.
So the record-breaking jackpot blew up the back-of-ticket protocol, too. This time, the lottery office went to the winners. Haynes, Rockey, Johnson and more than a few certified law enforcement officers who work for the Nebraska Department of Revenue drove in a couple of unmarked cars over to Hoppe’s office in the Haymarket on Feb. 21, 2006.
There, they met the eight food production plant workers who would split a cash-option sum of $124,089,363.77.
They'd bought their $5 winning ticket Feb. 17, 2006, at 3:09 p.m., and it included a total of five shots at the jackpot. The four losing combinations were nearly complete duds.
But the first one listed was a bullseye -- 15-17-43-44-48-Powerball 29. A one-in-146-million shot.
And there it was on Hoppe’s conference table, signed, uncrinkled, in near-pristine condition.
“It didn’t look like the ticket had attended a party or anything,†Haynes said.
It passed the eyeball test from state investigators too. They just needed to take it back to the office to verify it through a set of procedures that are slightly more cloak-and-dagger than driving over to a lawyer’s office. The winners asked for a signed statement documenting the transfer of the ticket to the officials, and then handed it over.Â
For the Nebraska Lottery employees, this marked the beginning of the end of their crazy week.Â
“I think I went home (after the press conference) and had trouble sleeping because my phone wasn’t ringing,†Haynes said. “As quickly as it started, it ended just as abruptly.â€
For the winners, Haynes said, a new reality seemed to be hitting them.Â
“It might be like a nervous tension you’d associate with a first date,†he said. “Here are state officials coming in to receive a ticket they know is worth $365 million. There was a little hesitancy and nervousness on their part because they were so excited of this. When they handed over the ticket, there was a realization what this meant: OK, this is for real.â€